Back in December 2013, we discussed our plans to develop an improved web browser for Raspberry Pi. The browser is based on Epiphany (aka GNOME Web), as a replacement for the rather venerable version of Midori in Raspbian Wheezy.
Eight months and a lot of hard work later, we’re finally ready. As you can see from the video below, Epiphany on Pi is now a plausible alternative to a desktop browser for all but the most JavaScript-heavy sites.
Epiphany brings a host of neat features to Raspberry Pi, including:
- Much-improved HTML5 support
- A JavaScript JIT
- Hardware-accelerated video decoding
- ARMv6-optimized blitting functions
- Better interactivity during page loading
- Faster scrolling
Future releases of Raspbian and NOOBS will include Epiphany as the default browser, but the necessary packages are already in our repository. To install, type:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser
Epiphany for Raspberry Pi was produced by our friends at Collabora. ARM assembly language optimisations were provided (as always) by Ben Avison of RISC OS Open.
